Mic Crenshaw: Rockin' mics and fighting fascists

As another Presidential election stares at us, it's time to dust off yer dukes

Among the more remarkable listens of the week for me was reporter McKay Coppins dishing on Mitt Romney as a means of publicizing his new book collab with the retiring Utah Senator and former Republican presidential nominee. I caught Coppins on Wednesday and perked up
especially at his account of Romney being bummed to discover, via January 6, how many Americans prefer a strongman figure to Constitutional authority. 

The perk-up came because just this summer I got acquainted with the nation’s deep-seated and under-publicized strain of fascist affinity, through the documentary Cinecittà Babilonia: Sex, Drugs, and Black Shirts. The degree to which Hollywood played footsy with Mussolini amounted to more than dutiful homage.

Coppins’ lament had me dropping a text to the Portland homey Mic Crenshaw, The New Yorker’s idea of an ANTIFA icon. This year I’ve also come to know him as star of Twin Cities PBS’s The Baldies, an invigorating look at a huge little moment in American anti-fascist organizing. This summer I did some work for Crenshaw and was around enough to catch his downtown Portland talk on It Did Happen Here, a new podcast-turned-book about the Nazi murder of an African immigrant student in Portland and the killing’s remarkable aftermath.

I texted the the rapper/activist to get him talking in specifics about how to fight fascists and also generate a little energy around his December 2 and 3 appearances at the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco. (Tickets to the Opening Night party can be purchased here.) We spoke on Thursday night via Zoom. Crenshaw talked from Portland while I was in Oakland.

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I just saw that you’re down in town here next month, at City College, actually. And this is part of that multimedia project that you’re working on called It Did Happen Here. I heard you talk about It Did Happen Here at the Powell’s Books up in Portland and it’s cool to see that you’re taking the project wider.

I knew so little about this murder and the reaction to that event. It would be great if you let the people who are reading here know what the project’s about.

The It Did Happen Here podcast was the first iteration of us telling this story, and it’s a story that links the anti-fascist organizing and anti-racist organizing efforts of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Portland, Oregon to a community response in the wake of Mulugeta Seraw’s murder. 

Mulugeta Seraw was an immigrant who was a student and a beloved family member who had migrated to Portland and was in college. He was out with a group of friends one night and got into an altercation with some neo-Nazi boneheads who were members of a gang, a right-wing terrorist gang called Eastside White Pride. And they beat him to death with a baseball bat over a parking dispute.

Now, people get into altercations that turn violent often, but what made this one particularly problematic is that the men who killed Mulugeta Seraw had been part of a white supremacist organization that was networking with national white supremacist organizations and was using their ideology to go out and attack people of color, to attack sexual minorities.

So people came together here in the community of Portland and made a stand, radical people from different walks of life: queer folks, anti-racists, anti-fascists, punk rockers, students, different anti-racist skinheads were at the center of that. 

The reason I agreed to take part in the podcast is because my own roots in Chicago and Minneapolis in the eighties put me in the midst of the organizing that was happening on the streets there.

I have some questions about your Minnesota days specifically that I want to get to, but what do you mean when you say they made a stand?

Community defense and direct action are two of the terms used to describe in response to this violent threat from the neo-Nazis and racists on the streets of Portland and across America, really. Community defense involves people organizing—without police, without support of the city or state, the county or the media. 

It’s people like you and me—Note: Crenshaw has an ongoing relationship with Portland’s KBOO + you are here with me—saying we don’t feel safe and we need to do something about it. So, let’s figure it out: A woman’s house just got attacked, let’s figure out how to keep her house safe; she doesn’t want them to come back.

So, networking and having conversations, getting into groups of friends and people who have a common understanding of what the problem is, who are willing to put their bodies on the line and protect the community from these violent acts. 

And in some cases, we make an offensive stance. Instead of just reacting to a violent threat, actually organizing and finding that threat and preempting it.

Is that the definition of ANTIFA right there?

You could say that. ANTIFA is a broad term. People have a lot of perceptions, but what it really means is anti-fascist. It’s an abbreviation for anti-fascist. It’s a movement that started a long time ago, started in Europe, although we can argue that anti-fascist movements didn’t just start in Europe between World War 1 and World War 2. We can argue that anywhere that empire has been in engaged in the oppression of people through state violence and violence that has a nationalist, racist or discriminatory aspect where the state turns a blind eye to it. Any action that resists that is anti-fascist activity.

We can think about the Roman Empire and all of the different indigenous people who resisted against that, as they could have been considered anti-fascist struggles as well.

So what was the outcome of this murder in Portland? And how did it tie into this project?

In order to answer this question we do need to go back a few years prior to 1988—that’s the year Mulugeta Seraw was killed. The nation took notice because the trial was big. The southern Poverty Law Center, one of their big lawyers came out. It was in the news, in the newspapers. 

Prior to that making national news, an organization called Anti-Racist Action had started in the Midwest. It was started by a group of anti-racist skinheads who were called the Minneapolis Baldies. I was a founding member of both organizations, Minneapolis Baldies and Anti-Racist Action. 

Laura Domella

We networked with other anti-racist skinhead crews across the Midwest: Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison—a handful of cities. We had a handful of meetings called The Syndicate, where we all discussed how we were going to support each other in fighting neo-Nazis in each of our cities.

That started in Minneapolis, and the work that we did influenced what happened here in Portland, because some people from that initial grouping of The Syndicate and Anti-Racist Action came to Portland right around the time that Mulugeta got murdered and provided material support for community defense against Nazis in Portland.

We had to seek out other people who agreed with our tactics and agreed with our ideology: That Nazis can’t come here. And if they go? We’re going to go where they go. We’re going to find them.

What was the outcome? I mean, I don’t want to spoil it because It Did Happen Here is a multi-platform thing.

We started with the podcast, where we gathered interviews with people who were part of that movement. Some are in Portland, some are in other places. Some folks from Chicago and Indianapolis are part of it as well, because we’d all participated. 

Then PM Press had published the book, and since then we’ve been going around to cities and telling the story with the audiences, some of whom are veterans of the movement themselves. 

What happened was, the organization called WAR—White Aryan Resistance—which was led by Tom Metzger, was held accountable for that murder. He was held accountable for organizing Nazis here, influencing them to go out and commit hate crimes. They lost the trial and were bankrupted by the trial. Tom Metzger recently died. 

I didn’t know that.

Rot in hell Tom Metzger. That group in California was held accountable. They were sued for I don’t know how many millions of dollars and were bankrupted Nazis. In the wake of the organizing that happened, they started to be less visible. They didn’t disappear. But they began figuring out different ways to move so they would no longer be targets. It was no longer safe for them when organizations like Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, Coalition for Racist Dignity, and Anti-Racist Action made it known that if the Nazis were going to be a presence they were going to face violence.

From the this spring’s Minnesota Historical Society screening.

I want to talk about The Baldies a bit more later… but you’re one of the more visible ANTIFA figures in Portland, is that fair to say?

Yeah?

When I hear people say ANTIFA, a lot of people have a perception in their mind. It’s a little bit different from how I’ve done my work over the last 35, 40 years.

Why don’t you spell that out?

I got engaged in this work at 16. What me and my friends did in starting the Minneapolis Baldies was something done by teenagers who were best friends. When we started what we were doing—just kickin’ it together and feeling the camaraderie and the vibe and the friendship—we didn’t realize that in a short time we would become politically active. We became politically active because neo-Nazis started showing up in our community.

When they started to show up in our community, we said, “Naw, y’all can’t hang out here.” That became the beginning of our violent confrontations with neo-Nazis. That sustained violent period on the streets of Minneapolis and sometimes St. Paul, Minnesota created in us a need to organize across our communities, for safety.

We had to seek out other people who agreed with out tactics and agreed with our ideology: That Nazis can’t come here. And if they go? We’re going to go where they go. We’re going to find them. That period of my life lasted about five or six years of pretty intense activity in which I did a lot of growth. You’re looking at about the age of 16 to 21.

By about 22, I left Minneapolis for Portland. When I came here, I knew immediately I had a family on the street in the anti-racist skinhead scene, but I also wanted to make a change and not center violence as part of how I was interacting with my community. So, I started to transition into different ways of expressing my political understanding of what the problems were and how to contribute to solutions.

My exposure to open Proud Boys and MAGA people was limited—happily. Not sure whether we’ve talked about it, but I’d went out to Burns, Oregon back when those guys took over—

—the Malheur thing?

Yeah, yeah yeah—that was the one when I sensed that something really different was happening. Then there was something like the Trump Prayer Breakfast, downtown protest where everyone started fighting. That was the first that I saw Baked Alaska and those sort of people showing up. I didn’t know what they were, but I thought, "This is what the sixties must have felt like. [Laughs] It was just brawling and on the edge shit that I hadn’t experienced in American life up until then.

I say all of this because, I dropped in on all of this. You had to live up there when all of this mess was really peaking, up through 2020. What’s that like, to live in it?

To me, it’s America. What we’ve seen in Portland is a reflection of what’s happening everywhere. There’s a lot of focus on Portland because of the demographics. I think, in the mainstream media there’s something spectacular about white people in a predominantly white city taking a militant stance against racism. They see in that a contradiction. They say, “This is something spectacular to explore and exploit.”

Because it will make people go, “What? Why in the whitest city in America are there so many white people who are taking a stance against racism.?” It’s full of contradictions.

Can you answer that, by the way? I’m working on a story now that I just can’t believe. White people are different up there.

I think it’s complicated. In a city like Portland, Oregon you have a significant populace of left-leaning white folks. Progressive, liberal to radical white folks. The progressive and liberal movements of the sixties that were anti-war and feminist and pro women’s liberation, a lot of those people settled in this area and are in alignment with those ideals of those movements. I think that in a lot of those people whose children are radical left, progressive, and liberal is an anti-authoritarian orientation, to the status quo, to the establishment. They see themselves as [not] wanting to contribute to some of the problems that are caused by their culture: The history of white supremacist settler-colonial dominance of this land mass.

Some of them have had the privilege of studying in school and college and having access to information and community with people who understand that [they] have contributed to some of the most profound problems that we face as human beings today.

Yeah, but I didn’t get an answer to the question.

What?

What’s it like living there when it was, like, open fighting for a very long time? And you’re visible. Did you have to take specific precautions? Were you walking around less?

Look man, I’ve been on stage… put it this way: I’ve been a public figure for most of my life at this point. I was in the streets fighting, organizing at the age of 16. That put me at a certain level of exposure, because we were literally on street corners—afternoons and nights— for most of our existence. That was our lifestyle. We would meet in public places, going to shows, going to record stores, hanging out on corners, looking for these guys. There were a handful of us who became well-known then. There was media exposure. There were a few of us that were photographers, so we had a lot of pictures.

That’s why when you look at The Baldies Facebook page or when you look at The Baldies documentary or even when you look at the It Did Happen Here book and website, there’s all these amazing black-and-white photos that are actually archival footage from our everyday lives.

These were mostly student photographers.

Kids who were in high school, that were actually taking photography classes.

That’s amazing to me. I haven’t set up The Baldies thing and most people don’t know about it, but I found it really striking, not only knowing that this movement happened, but that this photography exists. You were part of a Minneapolis screening this spring, right?

The Minnesota Historical Society and we’ve done a couple of screenings in Portland. The Baldies’ doc is available for free on YouTube. It was produced by Twin Cities Public Television, directed by David Roth. It won a Midwest Emmy and just passed a million views on YouTube, so watch it. It’s also on the Twin Cities Public Television website.

It’s a documentary about the founding and the lifespan of the Minneapolis Baldies. It talks to a lot of us veterans that are still around and active in whatever movements we participate in now. But it goes back to the roots of how we started, in around eighty-six.

The student journalism has that candor, you know? It’s unpolished in the best way. It’s almost punk rock.

It is punk rock. The reason it got produced is that there’s another city on Minnesota Hardcore, on the punk scene there. People asked why there wasn’t an episode on The Baldies and so David Roth circled back and got it done.

I want to shift a little bit, because you played a track for me, sent me something over the phone. And I cannot not talk about what’s happening in Palestine and Israel.

I’ve followed the conflict most of my adult life, just as a part of journalism. Feels like this go-round’s coverage is different.

I followed it all of my life, too. Some of the first episodes of the nightly news that I watched in the living room at my grandparents’ house, there was a war happening between Israel and Lebanon. There were various conflagrations and conflicts between Israel and other states and Yasir Arafat on TV a lot. I remember Sadat X helping with—

[Laughter]

Not Sadat X. Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, right? Shout out to Brand Nubian. [Laughter] I remember not understanding why the leaders would get together at a long table with pitchers of water and microphones. The media would be there snapping pictures and then they would shake hands. They would be talking about peace agreements and peace accords. Yet and still, there is an ongoing conflict where people are dying and buildings are being bombed. We’re seeing yet another iteration of this.

At some point I had to try to understand, what is this thing that’s been a feature of my whole life, in this particular region of the world. It has to be important enough for me to investigate. And when I investigated, starting in the nineties, I started to understand that there are people in an area that once was a country called Palestine that were being occupied by the recent development of another country called Israel. And that Israel was an ethnostate created in the wake of the war against the Nazis in Europe in World War 2.

That’s about all I understood. As time went on and I began to listen and learn and watch I started to learn that Palestine was shrinking. And that Israel was encroaching on Palestine more and more.

But it was a very confusing issue because both sides of the conflict had a degree of trauma in their history. What I noticed in the American media, which was my only source of information when I was thinking about this, was that the Jews were portrayed as the underdogs. But I started to notice there were some contradictions. That the underdog seemed to be taking the lives of more people than the supposed aggressors. The Palestinians were always portrayed as the aggressor.

Then I started to notice that the Palestinians in their resistance would fire rockets. And it would be on the news that the Palestinians had done a rocket attack, but they never mentioned whether anyone got killed or not. Then they would say that in response Israel had bombed people in Gaza or Israel had an incursion into the West Bank. I started to notice that every time Palestinians would fire rockets, I didn’t hear of Israeli people dying—and I’m not saying they wouldn’t—but then scores of Palestinians would be killed in response.

That’s when I noticed this was asymmetrical. That’s when I started looking deeper, beyond what I was seeing from the news in The West and I started to understand that there’s a difference between the geo-political, strategic establishment of the state of Israel and how that intersects with a Zionist ideology. There’s a difference between that and the mass of Jewish people, whether in Israel or the diaspora. All over the earth.

Just because somebody is Jewish doesn’t mean they’re Zionist. And the interests of Zionist Israel isn’t the interest of all Jewish people. It’s something that you have to look into and you have to study it, but it’s a very dangerous thing to talk about publicly because if you talk about it in a way that’s critical of Zionist Israel you will be labeled an antisemite and your career could be destroyed.

So what I’ve noticed, back to your original question, is that this time more people are courageous. And the amount of vulnerability that they’re willing to expose themselves to, to speak up, and say critically: What Israel is doing is wrong and it needs to stop, because this is genocide. The tax dollars that come from the working people of America fund it.